Fun New KPI
IEEE came up with 25 different reliablity indicies that I thought covered every possible situation. Yesterday that changed.
One of my client sponsors showed me a statistic on reliabilty that I had never thought of. The new metric -
"How many minutes has the utility had with no outages for any customer?"
In otherwords - how many minutes has the utility accumulated during the year where every single customer had power?
I have asked several utilities and the answers are fun - from 0 (zero) minutes, to over 2400 minutes. This would be a fun number to collect.
Resilience is a very difficult metric to measure. I am working on an article on resilience and what forms it can take - I am amazed at what counts and does not count, when you sit down and start doing the actual physics.
Would’nt Resilience be a better metric than Reliability ? https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/ICSJWG-Archive/QNL_MAR_16/reliability%20and%20resilience%20pdf.pdf
Guy - I agree, however there are literally millions of pieces of equipment in a typical utility's grid. And...squirrels, birds, storms, and drunk drivers all have a major impact on the grid daily. Today we had 3 outages caused by drunk drivers, a pretty typical day. The sad part, one of these outages was on a underground circuit, also pretty typical (some of the photos on how they take out an underground circuit are pretty funny (but also sad)). If it were purely equipment reliability, we would see a lot lower set of numbers, but unfortunately it is not. From time to time we even get people with chainsaws who want to steal wire or otherwise take equipment from the grid (some use backhoes or attach to conductors with trucks/bulldozers to pull conductor out of the ground too) - again equipment specifications don't help with these problems. We do need to build a stronger grid - and we do need to work on reliability, but for the typical age of equipment sitting out in the weather, the grid does pretty well (as I sit looking at a 75 year old transformer that is still in continuous service).
Adjunct at University of Portland
7 年Interesting metric. At the same time, it really highlights a huge disconnect between what the power industry is capable of delivering and what is really needed by loads. You need look no further than the ITI (CBEMA) Curve for equipment (https://www.sceg.com/docs/librariesprovider5/pdfs/powerqualitystandards.pdf , page 4). With traditional metrics (e.g., SAIFI, SAIDI, MAIFI), power companies and Utility regulators are looking at down times and recovery times in hours and minutes, whereas equipment manufacturers measure it in milliseconds. That's a several orders of magnitude disconnect. (Not to mention that as a consequence, we mandate inefficiencies into the system design of power supplies and backup equipment). One wonders what it will take to get the two ends of this to meet? And where will emerging energy storage solutions play in bridging the gap?
IEEE Volunteer and retired Energy Industry Leader and Educator
7 年Fun? I agree! #utilityengineerfun